Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination and the Expression of True Freedom / Vincent Lloyd

For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & Culture

The primal scene of domination and slavery inevitably produces struggle. It must. Because domination is the idolatrous effort of one to exert control over the will of the other, and we are compelled as free beings to realize and always live that freedom. So the struggle produces dignity, and that dignity, declared and acted and performed and practiced and sung and chanted and screamed and whispered—when enacted by all human beings against various and sundry forms of domination, it leads to joy and love.

Vincent Lloyd (Villanova University) joins Evan Rosa to discuss his book Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination. We start with what struggle against domination is, especially how it’s expressed in Black life. We entertain the feeling of struggle psychologically and culturally; the ugly and vicious temptation to idolatry that seeking domination and mastery over others entails; how the humanity of both the master and the slave are lost or found; how struggle produces dignity; and an understanding of the debate between seeing dignity as purely intrinsic as opposed to performative. We close by thinking about how the Black struggle for dignity can inform all of us about what it means to actualize our humanity, embrace the power our freedom entails, culminating in joy and love.

This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.

About Vincent Lloyd

Vincent Lloyd is Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Studies and Director of the Center for Political Theology at Villanova University. He is the author of Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination (Yale University Press, 2022), Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons, with Joshua Dubler (Oxford University Press, 2019), In Defense of Charisma (Columbia University Press, 2018), Religion of the Field Negro: On Black Secularism and Black Theology (Fordham University Press, 2017), Black Natural Law (Oxford University Press, 2016), The Problem with Grace: Reconfiguring Political Theology (Stanford University Press, 2011), and Law and Transcendence: On the Unfinished Project of Gillian Rose (Palgrave, 2009). Visit his personal website here.

Show Notes

• What is struggle?
• Augustine’s approach to struggle in Confessions: with oneself, with others, with the world, with the powers that be
• Phenomenology of human struggle: What are the features of struggle that land on the human consciousness?
• Struggling against not flesh and blood but powers and principalities.
• Righteous indignation against idolatry
• Rejecting humanity by presenting oneself in a position of mastery
• Making distinctions between individual persons, the vice of the will to dominate, and the system those vices create
• The struggle of a community
• Ontological struggle: Aimed at defeating domination
• “Is struggle dependent on the existence of some prior will to dominate?”
• Understanding oneself as “master” and setting oneself up as a god.
• Mastery is a particularly vicious form of idolatry.
• The primal scene of master and slave is always behind the amorphous systems we struggle against.
• What is the psychology of the will to dominate?
• Is domination a special vice? Or is it a more ubiquitous vice?
• Black theology, Black philosophy, and the experience of the Middle Passage
• Enslavement continues to fuel anti-Blackness
• The humanity of master and slave are both lost
• Black rage and Audrey Lorde’s 1981 “The Uses of Anger”
• Emotion as a symphony, not a cacophony
• Airing rage next to each other and clarifying our vision of the world
• Rethinking Human Dignity
• Retelling the story of democratizing and Christianizing the aristocratic beginnings of “dignity”
• “When we perform dignity, we’re struggling.”
• Distinguishing dignity from respectability (and turning away from respectability)
• “That's where dignity is truly democratized, right? What we all have in common as human is our capacity to turn away from domination, and turn toward the divine. That's where dignity has a universal quality.”
• Understanding the debate between seeing dignity as intrinsic vs dignity as performative or extrinsic.
• “We’re all dominated.”
• How exactly does struggle produce dignity?
• Emmanuel Levinas and responding to the Jewish Holocaust, giving morality new content by tethering it to encounter—seeing the infinite shine through in the face of the other, allowing new concepts to flow through like love and justice.
• How do we finally move from domination, to struggle, to dignity, to joy and love?

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Vincent Lloyd
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give